Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk, (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria,
South Africa), South African-born American entrepreneur who cofounded the
electronic-payment firm PayPal and formed
SpaceX , maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was
also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive
officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla.
Elon
Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.
As
the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon leads all product design, engineering and
global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products and
solar energy products.
Since the company’s
inception in 2003, Tesla’s mission has been to accelerate the world’s
transition to sustainable energy.
Musk
attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to
the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s
degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate school in
physics at Stanford University in California, but he left after only two days
because he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society
than work in physics. In 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and
business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer
manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial
services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in
transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for
$1.5 billion.
Musk had long
been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became
one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car
company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2006
Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 245 miles (394
km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk
thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0
to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2010 the company’s
initial public offering raised about $226 million. Two years later Tesla
introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its
performance and design. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury
SUV, which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle,
went into production in 2017.
Musk
expressed reservations about Tesla being publicly traded, and in August 2018 he
made a series of tweets about taking the company private, noting that he had
“secured funding.” The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were
“false and misleading.” Shortly thereafter Tesla’s board rejected the SEC’s proposed
settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign. However, the news
sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its
terms included Musk stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was
allowed to continue as CEO.
Dissatisfied
with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in
California, Musk in 2013 proposed an alternate faster system, the Hyperloop, a
pneumatic tube in which a pod carrying 28 passengers would travel the 350 miles
(560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of
760 miles (1,220 km) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. Musk claimed that the
Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every
two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who
travel that route every year. However, he stated that, between running SpaceX
and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloop’s development.